I like japan because there is anime and jrock and manga desuU!! And gackt is so KAWAII! X3333 ^______________________^

Not really.

Recently my interest in japan has decreased and now I'm just learning the language without any eagerness. I'm now more interested in Hong Kong, but japan hasn't died yet

Food is the thing I like. I ate sushi in Finland in a bar where the ingredients were very fresh and place was nice. The flavour is not the most delicious, but it's exotic, and sushi looks very appetizing. Haven't tried any other japanese foods yet, but I fell in love with sushi

Other reason is that the Japan is a very culture rich country, and there is some western culture mixed in it. B)

When I was there I found the Japanese to be extremely polite to me. It didn't annoy me at all. I remember everytime I'd go shopping I was treated like a guest instead of just a customer. It was quite nice.

Also, I enjoyed karaoke, going to the izakaya and the fact that it's so CLEAN is a huge plus!

the signs were so funny because they revealed the remarkable unoriginality of Japanese business names and the bizarre ways in which the Japanese mind combines words to convey abstract ideas

Reading her "Linguistic Diversions" makes it pretty clear that she never caught on that many kanji are used for their sounds not their meaning.

No one can tell me why two sections of Tokyo are called Harajuku (“Field Hotel" ) and Shinjuku ("New Hotel" )『hen they have no more or fewer hotels than any other section｛r why Meguro ("Eye Black" ) is called that.

The Japanese do not express thoughts the way we do. We learn words, plus rules for combining parts of speech into sentences; they learn combinations of words that express specific abstract concepts. This medium offers nothing approaching the expressive range of English. How could such a technological giant muster itself on this preposterous basis?

A little knowledge is dangerous indeed.

Last edited by Wakannai on Tue 10.23.2007 6:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks for posting that Mike - I got a sort of perverse pleasure out of it but I'm still shocked I actually read all the way through. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry as that couple stumbled their way around Japan misinterpreting and overlaying their own prejudices on everything they saw. First trip to Japan, fair enough, but there were some amazing comments in there.

Food references aside, for me this is that passage that sums it all up (apparently this guy learnt 700 kanji, but no Japanese words before his trip)

I am delighted to be able to read the kanji on that building yonder, evidently the Women’s National Pharmaceutical College (literally, "Woman Nation Stand Medicine Drug Great Study" ), and the sign on that fence that clearly intends "keep off the fence" (by literally stating, "upright enter prohibit stand" ), as well as on the truck over there, which delivers "Forest Perpetual Ox Milk" (it turns out that "Forest Perpetual"｀orinaga（s the owner's name). (I find it astonishing that such a modern culture can flourish using a pictographic system so utterly primitive―"milk" , for example, being composed of a mother's hand clutching her infant to her breast 》hat it seems scarcely more advanced than the cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux!)

Last edited by Oracle on Tue 10.23.2007 8:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

His comment on Shinjuku is asinine because surely it must occur to even the dimmest of bulbs that maybe a while ago, when that name was given to the place, there was a new hotel or something like that.

Last edited by Yudan Taiteki on Tue 10.23.2007 10:13 am, edited 1 time in total.